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City Prefers Its Own Transportation Census, Thank You

By Michael M. Grynbaum May 2, 2011 12:45 pmMay 2, 2011 12:45 pm

Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City’s innovative transportation commissioner, has a bone to pick with the United States census.

“It has a distorting effect,” she said on the phone last week, discussing the ins and outs of tracking transportation habits in a city of eight million people. “It only looks at commuting to work, and work trips. It misses a lot of the travel in and between neighborhoods for shopping, and personal trips.”

“One of the strengths of New York is we have a variety of options of how we get around,” she added. “We can take the bus, take the train, we can walk, take a bike. In a lot of places, there aren’t that many options. When the census asks, ‘How do you get around?,’ if you take the train three days a week, or bike three times a week, that’s not counted.”

The stakes, for urban planners trying to devise smarter ways for millions to move around, can be high. Trust the census, with its one-size-fits-all questions, and risk prescribing policies that ignore the true needs of a mobile city.

So New York City, under Ms. Sadik-Khan’s direction, has developed its own in-house Transportation Census — an annual index that reports, in almost worryingly granular detail, the rhythms of the metropolis. “We’re developing better ways to frame the inquiry of how our transportation system works,” the commissioner said. “It’s exciting.”

A perusal of this year’s report, released on Monday, yields nuggets like the average weekday speed of a car driving in Manhattan below 60th Street (9.3 miles per hour, nearly twice the rate of a crosstown bus); the proportion of people in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who drove a car into their neighborhood on a recent day (15 percent, about the same as those who took the subway and bus); and how much of the evening rush on Prince Street in SoHo consists of bicyclists (more than a third).

The city was happy to see that in many neighborhoods, about 9 out of 10 of people who spoke with interviewers walked or took mass transit to get around. “It supports the changes that we’ve made, as we’re building streets that work for everyone,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said, referring to her campaign to redistribute street space so that bicycles and pedestrians receive equal thrift to automobiles.

Those efforts have been met with strenuous criticism in some quarters, as drivers complain about fewer lanes and businesses worry about curbside access for drop-offs. (Bicyclists have also attracted a bit of backlash.) But the city, citing data from taxicab trips, says that driving speeds in Manhattan improved in 2009 by 6 percent from 2008, and speeds stayed about the same last year.

New Jersey seems to have lost a bit of interest in the city: the number of drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street from the Garden State dipped 6 percent in 2009. Traffic volumes from uptown Manhattan and Brooklyn, however, went up.

Over all, the volume of cars entering the city was up 0.3 percent in 2009, and traffic headed to Manhattan below 60th Street rose 1.1 percent in the same period. Over all, citywide traffic has fallen 2.4 percent from 2000 to 2009, including a significant dip after the 2008 financial crash.

In the long term, city studies have found that the transportation needs of the city’s growing population have largely been absorbed by mass transit in the last decade. Bus and subway ridership has gone up nearly 10 percent since 2003, in parallel with a drop-off in automobile use.

There is a bill pending in the state Legislature that would repeal a payroll tax that provides about half a billion dollars a year to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the city’s buses and subways. And the authority’s budget for capital projects will run out after this year.

Ms. Sadik-Khan did not discuss these developments specifically, but she said that the report could provide evidence for those who advocate for more transportation support from the state. “These findings point to a higher demand for transit,” she said, “and challenge Albany to resolve the problem of transit funding.”

Our transit reporter, Michael M. Grynbaum, advises you on the latest chatter from the city’s roads and rails. Check back every Monday. Have a tip? He can be reached at OffTheRails@nytimes.com.

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